Data from 326 animals of a F2 swine population were used to select traits related to meat quality by principal components analysis. The following traits were considered: pH at 45 minutes post mortem (pH45), pH at 24 hours post mortem (pHu), drip loss (DL), cooking loss (CL), total loss (TL), intramuscular fat (IMF), objective tenderness (OT), lightness (L), redness (a) and yellowness (b). Variation lower than 0.7 (eigenvalue lower than 0.7) indicated four traits, which were significantly correlated to the other traits, to be discarded. These results suggest the use of pH45, pHu, L, a, IMF and CL as swine meat quality traits in future experiments.
correlation; discarding variables; multivariate analysis; swine
